Ghost of Wutai
by A Darker Shade
Summary: Snow is falling in Edge. Tseng reflects on who he used to be, and who he has become. One shot.


**Tseng, Tseng, Tseng - why do you get into my head?**

**This one's not sexy - sorry. Don't want to get you reading under false pretences. **

**Tseng watches the snow, and thinks about who he is, and who he used to be.**

**Implied Tseng and Rufus. Just implied. You get what I'm saying? No sex. **

**I'll always love Reno, but at the moment... someone has made me fall in love with Tseng. If she reads this, she may know who she is. I suspect she may know who I am, too.**

**Please R&R if that intro doesn't put you off reading!**

**Oh yes - they don't belong to me *sigh*. Only each other. And Square. **

* * *

**Ghost of Wutai**

Something flickers at the edges of my vision and at first I am irritated, suspecting the onset of one of the migraines that are a minor curse in my life. But when it happens a second time, and a third, I realise that it is external, and looking towards the window, I register the cause: snow.

Before, when the reactors warmed the air, filling the sky with unnatural cloud and the resultant daytime twilight, it never snowed in Midgar.

Now it is snowing in Edge. Does that imply progress?

I should be working, but I set down my pen – ebony and silver, with a flexible nib that allows the ink to flow almost like the brushes I was brought up to use for writing. I walk to the window and watch the heavy flakes falling. I remember a line from a poem I learned as a child: _The first soft snow_… But the rest of it is gone – melted away like so much from those days.

Then, we would have held a festival for First Snow: my father's ministers and secretaries hastening to make arrangements and the whole household thrown into quiet chaos for a few hours until everything was prepared. My father would lead the procession along the banks of the River Wu out of the town and up into the foothills of Mount Da Chao. The priests would say the prayers to Leviathan and light the sacred fires to ward off the Winter spirits. Then we would watch the snow falling over Wutai. My older brothers took it in turns to recite Matzake's verses on snow: I would not be permitted that honour until I reached maturity at fourteen. But, as fate – or chance – would have it, by that time everything had changed.

In Wutai there were many legends to explain snow. The one my mother favoured was the story that falling snowflakes were the silver scales of Leviathan, shed as he battled the Ice Dragon to bring about the end of Winter. When I was very young – still small enough to spend my days in my mother's rooms - I remember asking how Leviathan could lose so many scales without coming to harm. "Hundreds and thousands," I said, watching the tumbling snowflakes – the screen of my mother's sitting room open to the weather. I was warm, wrapped in a dark kimono of winter-weight silk. My mother only smiled and said, "And all those are less than a millionth of the scales Leviathan possesses. Don't fear, Xiaolu – Leviathan never loses. If he did, there would be no Spring – and Spring comes every year, doesn't it?"

That idea filled me with a dread I still remember. "But what if, one year, he loses?" I asked. My mother laughed. "My last son is such a timid one!" she said – but kindly. "Spring has always come: it will always come."

Xiaolu, she used to call me. A nickname meaning little deer. She always said I was quieter than my brothers – more hesitant, more quick to startle. I wonder if that was true, or if it was only that, as her youngest, she babied me? After I was born the doctors told her it would be dangerous to have any more children. I was the youngest of seven boys, and I think, although boys were generally favoured, she wished I had been a daughter. She once told me that if she had been granted a girl, she would have called her Shika – 'deer'.

In Wutai there used to be many legends to explain snow – but the one my mother told was the prettiest, and so, I expect, it is the one that remains – the one they tell the tourists. The other stories – concerning crazed spirits, dismembered gods, vengeful ghosts – those have been consigned to history books now, known only to the handful of students indulging in Wutai Studies at the Shinra University here in Edge. For everyone else Wutai is diminished to a colourful postcard; dragon festivals; short poems; silk and tea and fans; exotic girls in bright costumes; takeout food.

Who is to blame for that? My father, for opposing Shinra in the first place? Kang Zhu, for his cowardice and the blades of his assassins? Kisaragi, for failing, for saving what was left by trapping it in time like a fly in amber, like a miniature painted pagoda inside a snow-globe: _Greetings from Wutai_. No more real than Kalm or Nibelheim: shadows of what once was.

Or am I to blame? For my inaction? For all the days and the nights when the life of the Shinra Prince was in my hands and I kept it safe when I could have taken it? There are a thousand ways to kill, and I have had a thousand chances – the pulse in his neck so vulnerable beneath my fingers, beneath my mouth – his breath, deep and even as he sleeps, so easy to cut off with a pillow or a hand – one hard thrust with a sharp blade, one bullet in the back of that golden head as he walks before me into a room. Never turn your back… But that's what he thinks I'm for – to watch _his_.

Rufus Shinra – I think I meant to kill you. After all this time there's no-one who could oppose me – no-one who would dare. Heidegger and Scarlet long dead. Your father's monsters – SOLDIER – gone, even the great Sephiroth, well named _The Demon of Wutai_, at peace, as far as anyone can know. Reeve would never stand against me: I know all of his secrets. Our old enemies would have no more reason to hate me than they hate you. The Kisaragi girl would be easy to remove, or I could let her have her throne. She would make a pretty princess for snow-globe Wutai in a world ruled by Wutai's true heir.

And your Turks, Rufus? What of your loyal Turks? Veld made them his, and then I made them mine. If I threatened you perhaps Reno would oppose me? If I killed you, none of them would – not after the event. They are nothing if not pragmatic, after all.

I know your world. I know the workings of this company as well as you do. I have no doubts about my ability to control everything you do, and more.

So why haven't I killed you?

Snow falls slowly down into Edge – the city you built and re-built out of the ashes of your father's disasters.

What have I built?

Perhaps my mother was right – perhaps I am too hesitant.

The night Kang Zhu's assassins came, I hesitated. It was the first night of Spring: my mother had been right about that too – Leviathan triumphed and Spring did return each year – although too few Springs for her, for my father, for all six of my brothers and the four wives of those who were married – twelve blades at three a.m. precisely – twelve neat red lines across twelve throats. But I was thirteen, and no Wutai assassin would break that taboo, even in this modern world – a child may not be slain with honour. And so the man whose blade was red with the blood of my brother Shui, shook me awake instead and said, "How old are you, boy?"

I hesitated. If I had done the honourable thing and lied, I would have died with my family, and damned his soul, to avenge their deaths. If I had said _fourteen_. It was a matter of weeks – not a big lie. But I found that I wanted to live, and I told him the truth. _Shi san_, instead of _shi si_. One whispered syllable that was the difference between life and death.

So instead of killing me, the assassin dragged me out of bed. I stumbled over Shui's body in the darkness, and began to cry. I was taken out of the house and into the courtyard where Kang Zhu was waiting for his orders to be fulfilled. Soon he was surrounded by men in dark clothes, and I understood from their calm reports that all the other members of my family were dead.

"_Why?_" was all I could sob.

"Your father was about to lead us into an unwinnable war with Shinra," Kang Zhu said, dispassionately. "The only hope for Wutai is to negotiate with Shinra. We can't hope to defeat such might, militarily. This is a coup. I am the new king of Wutai, and I will make peace with Shinra."

"Shinra is not interested in peace!" I told him. It was what I had heard my father say. I knew that many people were worried by my father's determination to fight against the obscenely powerful forces of the company from the East, but I had no idea that our lives were in danger because of it.

"Your opinion is worthless now," I was told. "You are no longer a prince of Wutai. You are _sei-gui_." It was an ancient term meaning _dead ghost_ – one who is less than nothing, a blank – an absence. Naming me _sei-gui_ was a political act: he could not kill me physically without a stain on his honour, but this symbolic _removal_ was just as effective. In the morning he had his guards hold me down while a priest of Leviathan tattooed the mark of a _sei-gui_ onto my forehead – a small black circle representing _wu_ – nothingness. I recognised the priest; he had officiated at the weddings of my four oldest brothers.

I was thrown into a storeroom in the pagoda that had been my family home and now belonged to Kang Zhu. When they were sure I was fourteen, they would kill me too, and my family would be gone.

But something in me wanted to live – and I escaped by killing the guard who brought my food. The first death of so many. So many.

So much snow! It's settling now, on ledges and rooftops, on the city square, on the monument we built after Meteor and rebuilt after Kadaj's summons destroyed it. Soon the city will be as white as Rufus Shira's clothes and the streets will be hushed with that strange, muffled quiet that deep snow brings. The world will be a blank – white paper waiting for a written command – for someone to wield a pen, or a brush.

When I escaped I became a ghost, just as they had named me. I drifted from town to town, rejected everywhere because of the mark that defined me as a non-being. I begged for work or food, and sometimes found it, but more often found blows and harsh words. I learned to steal, and run, and hide.

After two years of wandering and surviving, I found myself in Midgar, where Veld found me. By this time, at nearly sixteen, I could move as silently as light footsteps in soft snow, I could steal and lie and kill. I had become a shadow – a nothingness – a dead ghost indeed. Shinra had work for a creature like me: work I was good at. If I had been born a girl I would have been Shika – deer. Now I was Shikaka – assassin. It was a role I played well.

And Shinra opposed Wutai – the land I hated now with my whole being, for refusing to fight, for embracing the murderer of my family as its ruler – for erasing the memory of my father as though he had never been. So I worked for Veld, for Shinra, for the President. But when I was seventeen, Kang Zhu was killed, in his turn, by one of his own ministers, exasperated and disillusioned with a policy of appeasement that was leaving Wutai weak – taxed into penury and stripped of assets, just as my father had always said it would be.

Goddo Kisaragi was a strong man, and I was torn between hating him as one of Kang Zhu's original supporters, and admiring his determination to take a stand against Shinra and their plans to build a reactor on Wutai soil.

I hesitated still. My country had rejected me – Shinra had given me a home. But more and more the things I was asked to do in Shinra's name sickened me. I found that my admiration for Kisaragi outweighed my hate. Then, when I was twenty, the inevitable war started, and I found myself appalled by the reports I was reading – the secret files of casualty figures – the bravery of the Wutai soldiers and their elite force, the Engetsu, in the face of overwhelming force: Scarlet's weapons, SOLDIER, Sephiroth.

I have never told anyone in Shinra who I used to be. No-one has ever known my family name. I made myself a blank – a true ghost. To Veld I said only that I remembered being in school, and then our family falling into disgrace and my parents dying. I told him that the only name I could remember was this alias – Tseng – a common enough name in Wutai.

I began to hate what Shinra was doing to Wutai – to my country – but, at the same time, I began to realise that nothing I could do would prevent the war from being lost. Shinra's rise seemed inexorable – unavoidable – one of those reversals that happen again and again throughout history. And if that were true – the cyclical rise and fall of powers, peoples, civilisations – then why even try to fight it? But hadn't that been Kang Zhu's argument? Once again I hesitated. Shinra had become my home – my colleagues were my only family. As hard as I tried to remain a ghost, I found myself liking them as the years went by – Veld, my serious, strong mentor; quiet, powerful Rude; sharp, fiery Reno.

When the war with Wutai ended I found myself despising Kisaragi for his apparent willingness to sign away all of Wutai's rights. The materia ban seemed too harsh to be endured – and yet – what choices did he have, really? But I hated seeing the news reports of how _tamed_ Wutai had become – of how Kisaragi hoped to be able to welcome tourists soon… Wutai froze then; became a museum of itself. What point would there be for me in aiming to return to such a place?

It was in the months after the end of the war that I made a decision to stay with Shinra – to make myself the heart of Shinra – so that, if I ever came to see the possibility of a meaningful future for Wutai, I would return to my country as the effective ruler of the world.

I was surprised to find that I was an ambitious kind of ghost.

And so I stayed, and worked – Shinra's most efficient shadow. When the foolish president was killed I was neither sorry nor surprised; I had already turned all my attention to Rufus, watching him through his angry adolescence, making myself necessary to him. He was so much cleverer than his father – exponentially so. _He_ could surprise me - his casual betrayal of his father shocked me: I had thought I understood hate. I waited, quietly, as he grew into his power. I stayed with him through the calamities that befell us all, because I began to believe that he might really have some kind of an answer.

And now? Now the world is on its feet again. Look at this city, slowly filling with soft snow in the gathering darkness. You'd never know how close to obliteration it has come. Rufus has achieved that – with my help, and the help of all his Turks, and his former enemies, including Goddo Kisaragi's daughter, who calls herself the princess of Wutai.

Now, I think I understand why I have hesitated for so long. I think I know why I have let Rufus Shinra live. For a long time I was angry and resentful: I was the true prince of Wutai, serving the self-appointed king of a mere power company that somehow managed to rule the world. But Rufus was the real heir of that power, and I think, with me behind him in the shadows, he has become worthy of it. Or, at least, I believe he is capable of using it better than anyone else.

When I made him my lover, I thought it would make him easier to control, but things haven't worked that way.

I never thought a ghost could fall in love.

It seems I have made my decision without making it: the person I used to be is truly a dead ghost now, vanished into nothing, like these snowflakes on the glass of the windows, melting into slow tears, and falling into darkness. I will never return to Wutai to proclaim myself its rightful king. One day Yuffie Kisaragi will rule there, and I think she will restore our nation's pride and its vitality.

I will never tell Rufus who I was. I am Tseng – the name he calls me – and my place is at his side. Together, we might succeed in building something worthwhile. Together, we might achieve something that will last, at least for a little while.

Until the falling snow covers everything softly, leaving only an empty page.

And a new writer takes up the brush, or the pen.


End file.
